What geography, history, and power constraints compel Tehran to do
Iran’s regime is doing two things simultaneously that outside observers keep analyzing as one: fighting for regime survival against a convergence of threats it believes is designed to finish it, and — most unexpectedly — sensing an opportunity to change the strategic balance of the entire Middle East and possibly beyond. The Hormuz closure did something no nuclear weapon could have: it gripped the entire global economy within 72 hours. US strategy has been visibly incoherent. And in that gap, the Islamic Republic is asking a question it has not thought it could ask: what if we actually win this?
The Islamic Republic of Iran is not behaving irrationally. It is behaving like a regime that believes this moment is simultaneously the greatest threat it has ever faced and the greatest opportunity it may ever get. That combination — existential fear and strategic opportunism operating at the same time — is what makes Iran so difficult to read from the outside.
THE GEOSTRATEGIC SUBSTRATE
Geography explains the fixed condition and history reveals behaviors that persist across centuries from which all Iranian strategy flows.
Geographically, Iran is a fortress. Its 1.648m sq km plateau is ringed by the Zagros and Alborz mountains and edged by vast deserts, a geography that makes invasion costly and occupation harder still. Yet the same terrain that protects Iran also limits its ability to project conventional power far beyond its borders. That helps explain Iran’s enduring geostrategic logic: it sits at the hinge of Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Gulf, with a 2,440km coastline and command of one side of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption passed in the first half of 2025. Surrounded by American bases and regional rivals, Tehran has responded not with open-ended conventional reach but with asymmetric deterrence, proxy networks and nuclear hedging. Geography also disciplines Iran from within. Its Persian core sits on the plateau, but peripheral regions remain vulnerable to unrest and outside manipulation, forcing the state to prize internal cohesion as much as external defence. And although Iran is rich in hydrocarbons, holding some of the world’s largest oil and gas reserves, it is also acutely water-stressed, with drought and infrastructure decay turning natural abundance into strategic fragility.
Historically, Iran’s strategic outlook is shaped as much by memory as by geography. For centuries, Persian states have treated Mesopotamia as a necessary buffer: the Zagros are defensible only if hostile armies cannot consolidate on the Iraqi plain. Modern Iranian distrust of foreign powers is reinforced by a more recent trauma. The 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, backed by the United States and Britain, left behind a durable lesson in Tehran: when outside powers feel threatened, they intervene. That helps explain why Iranian suspicion of America is deeply rooted.
The Iran–Iraq war then hardened that instinct into doctrine. Eight years of conflict against a better-armed opponent taught Tehran that it could not reliably match U.S.-backed conventional forces, and so should instead rely on proxies, missiles, domestic mobilisation and strategic endurance. The same logic informs its nuclear posture. In the eyes of Iranian decision-makers, the fate of disarmed regimes such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya contrasts sharply with the survival of nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable states such as North Korea and Pakistan. Even so, the regime’s external posture rests on an increasingly brittle domestic base: repeated protest waves, most dramatically in 2009, 2019, 2022, and renewed unrest in late 2025 and early 2026, suggest a legitimacy problem that repression is containing less convincingly over time
INSTRUMENTS OF POWER
Iran’s military power rests less on classical strength and more on asymmetrical leverage. It still fields a large force of around 610,000 active personnel; but its real leverage lies in a nuclear programme that has pushed close to weapons threshold, a large missile-and-drone arsenal, and in an asymmetric doctrine. As of late 2025, the IAEA said Iran held 440.9kg of uranium enriched to 60%; since the strikes on its nuclear facilities. Tehran’s regional proxy network, built over decades, has been degraded but not erased. And at the centre of this system sits the IRGC, whose power is unusually broad: it is not just Iran’s military guardian, but a major economic actor too, with influence that stretches across construction, energy and finance.
Economically, Iran is a state of real resources and shrinking room for manoeuvre. The IMF puts nominal GDP at roughly $341bn in 2025, with inflation at 43.3%; by 2026 it expects recession and far higher price growth. Oil still keeps the system alive, and China remains the main buyer of Iranian crude, importing roughly 1.3m-1.4m barrels a day before the latest war disruption. Yet this creates a strategic contradiction. Iran’s position over Hormuz gives it leverage over the global energy system, but using that leverage also jeopardises its own revenues, tightens sanctions and deepens the economic crisis at home. Financial isolation compounds the problem: Iran remains on the FATF blacklist, struggles to access normal banking channels, and cannot modernise its energy sector properly despite its vast reserves
Iran’s ideational power is easier to miss, but it is real. Part of it comes from the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary claim to lead resistance against Western hegemony, a message that still travels in parts of the Global South and helps justify closer alignment with Russia and China. Part of it is older and deeper: Iran draws on a Persian civilizational identity that long predates the current regime and gives it cultural reach beyond the language of clerical rule. And part of it lies outside the state altogether, in a large and highly educated diaspora that represents a reserve of capital, expertise and influence, even if much of it stands in tension with the regime itself. Iran’s problem is not that it lacks instruments of power. It is that its military, economic and ideational tools are all strongest as instruments of resistance, and much weaker as foundations for renewal.
Iran’s power is amplified by politics, demography and technology, but also distorted by them. The political system concentrates real authority in the Supreme Leader and the IRGC, giving the state endurance while filtering out technocratic correction and making reform harder the more necessary it becomes. Demography gives Iran scale, manpower and a far-reaching diaspora, yet brain drain, youth alienation and low female participation in the workforce steadily hollow out that advantage. Technology shows the same pattern. Iran has become resourceful in drones, missiles and nuclear know-how under sanctions, but far less capable in civilian sectors where modern growth depends. It can innovate to resist pressure; it has been much less able to innovate its way into prosperity or legitimacy
IRAN’s GRAND STRATEGY
Iran’s grand strategy is shaped by four enduring drives: survival under encirclement, territorial integrity against fragmentation, economic sovereignty under sanctions, and civilizational continuity in the face of isolation. From these follow a set of clear strategic interests: keeping Iraq from becoming a hostile platform on its western flank, preserving leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, maintaining a nuclear threshold short of open weaponisation, sustaining influence among Shia actors across the region, and protecting autonomous decision-making from foreign coercion. These aims are pursued through a familiar, if increasingly strained, toolkit: proxy networks, nuclear hedging, the implicit threat of Hormuz interdiction, ideational influence that often outlasts military setbacks, and limited alignment with China and Russia to reduce diplomatic and economic isolation
What makes this moment especially dangerous for Iran is not any single weakness, but their convergence. Political rigidity, economic exhaustion, demographic alienation and strategic overstretch are no longer separate problems; they are reinforcing one another. A system built to survive external pressure now faces the harder test of internal erosion
SURVIVAL WITHOUT RENWAA
Iran’s leaders may believe they are approaching a moment of historic vindication. They may even be partly right. Geography still gives Iran depth. History still gives it strategic memory. Its coercive tools, though damaged, still allow it to impose costs out of proportion to its economic strength. But power is not only the ability to wound; it is also the ability to order, to absorb strain and to reproduce legitimacy. On that measure, the Islamic Republic looks less like an ascendant power than like a hard state entering a more dangerous phase of decline: still resilient, still feared, still capable of changing the calculations of others, but increasingly unable to resolve the contradictions within itself. The question is no longer whether Iran can survive. It is whether a regime built to resist the world can still build a future its own people are willing to live in.
AHMED BADRAN 
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